Maybe ASN.1 and SMI are so little known as a programming language because... they're not a programming language? Don't get me wrong, it's good to know if you're reading/writing RFC's or dealing with network protocols (especially in the telco space), but they're not programming languages.
Yeah, the number and variety of titles is lacking with Amazon KU. But this is typical Amazon (and business 101 actually). You start small and grow over time. Amazon negotiated the deals it could bring KU to market and no doubt plans to grow their titles/publishers over time. Remember when Amazon used to _only_ sell books? Or what about few titles were available Amazon Instant Video a year ago vs now? Sure, it won't happen over night (not so much Amazon's fault, they'd love to include more publishers/titles), but it will improve over time.
Love this ad by Dice/Red Hat in an attempt to attract talent. I mean, I sure hope it's an ad, because if it's a legit bit of "news" then slashdot's standards have really fallen.
I take it you've never heard of Libya or Syria? Not saying that in some situations a peaceful revolution can't be successful, but at the same time I don't believe it's the only means of doing so. American history shows that both ways can be successful, but it really depends on the leader.
Not to mention as we've seen in the Arab Spring uprising, it's one thing to use your military against a foreign nation, it's a totally different thing to use it against your own population. Soldiers generally don't like pointing their guns at their bothers, sisters, neighbors and friends.
Modern commercial aircraft are "reliable" because they get hundreds of hours of maintenance each year. Car engines are reliable, but require regular maintenance as well (oil changes, timing belt, etc). But generally it's all the electronics which start failing (electric door locks, powered windows, etc) for a wide range of reasons. My BMW for example has had various electronic problems including a recall on the spark plug coils (talk about an old technology and they still can't get it right!) and various other electronic gremlins (one of which killed my battery every 5 days if I didn't drive it because the A/C sucked 800ma/h even when off).
Frankly, I've been in tech now for nearly two decades and if it's taught me one thing it's this: very very few people/organizations know how to make reliable software & electronics. Those electronics which have to be reliable (or people die) are very very expensive vs. your normal commercial/consumer electronics (your iPod for example). Even systems designed with reliability in mind can fail (Amazon AWS outages for example).
Now start thinking about the conditions and elements a firearm is designed to go through with minimal maintenance: moisture, dirt, sand, salt, harsh cleaning chemicals, shock & vibration, etc which can cause corrosion and in general wreak havoc on electronics. Cars and plane electronics can have a lot of weather sealing (which adds bulk and weight) which is isn't so reasonable in a firearm you are supposed to carry and hold with one or two hands.
Simply put, added complexity reduces reliability and significantly increases costs.
That said, the best safety is training and being responsible (storing them in a safe, etc). Teaching people to respect (not fear) and how to properly handle firearms is the best safety. That's why I don't trust "safeties" on my firearms and I treat them as *always* loaded unless *I* personally have just verified it's state because a safety can fail for a variety of reasons (poor design, abuse, poor maintenance, etc). I won't even trust someone else verifying it for me- I have to visually check it myself.
That said, there are some really crappy guns being made which nobody should ever own/buy, but they're cheap. I do wish there were some appropriate safety/reliability testing standards that firearms had to pass and each one was given a rating (sorta like how safety ratings are done for cars). California does this which sorta gets it right, but causes problems for smaller manufacturers (like Les Baer, etc) which make very high quality firearms as well as other problems. A federal standard would help here, but frankly, I don't think I'd trust the Gov't to do it well and so a lot of gun owners like myself are hesitant to support such a measure and instead prefer to do our own research.
In my case, kicking and screaming. Our IT dept uses Oracle extensively for various things and for various reasons that basically forced my team to also use Oracle although we'd all prefer PG or yes even MySQL. Now that my team is moving to JRuby (which is awesome btw), Oracle driver suckage is less of a problem, but we all find Oracle a PITA to use query wise and it's not nearly as well supported in the OSS community for things like ActiveRecord (although recent versions of the oracle_enhanced-adapter seem to have solved many of our problems), etc.
That said, there have been some things that Oracle does really well and actually makes easy compared to PG/MySQL, but it's been a constant learning exercise for us. That said, little things like having to use WHERE ROWNUM = X, rather then LIMIT which basically always requires a subselect to get correct results is just annoying and makes our code less portable.
Not to say other RDBMS don't have their own set of problems, but at least we have a few decades worth of combined experience of PG/MySQL so we know how to avoid/work around them. But hey AC, thanks for the troll!
At least here in California (your state may be different) the CTA (California Teachers Association which is the largest teachers union in California) is *very* powerful in state politics. Per wikipedia:
"The CTA is the most influential spender in California politics, spending more money on politicians and to influence California voters than Chevron, AT&T, Philip Morris and Western States Petroleum Association combined"
So yeah, if you don't think teacher unions don't influence politics here you're not paying attention.
Unfortunately, here in the Bay Area, diesel is often more expensive then premium and 30-40 cents more expensive then regular. Annoying since diesel is basically a by-product of refining gasoline, but the global market for diesel is exploding (the US is the worlds largest exporter of diesel) and the newer cleaner ultra-low sulfur formulations are sending the price skyhigh compared to what it used to be.
That's basically what happens today with most protocols like SSL/TLS. For each new connection, the client and server negotiate a new key via public key crypto like RSA. Actually, based on some comments in the article, like needing more "transactions" to help break the encryption, makes me believe the NSA is actually working to break RSA then AES.
I always make a point to include "books, magazines, websites, blogs, manuals, nutritional food labels, directions for building Ikea furniture, etc"
I've found it better then asking what their hobbies are and if they say they don't read anything then it's an immediate fail. Overall I've found it tends to allow people to open up a bit more about what floats their boat then trying to be all PC about things. Some people give really bland answers (especially if they don't read much), but I've found that the A players tend (but not always) to get really excited about this question and can talk about it at length. YMMV.
In the absence of a student loan program at the time, I can only imagine that his parents were actually wealthy enough to send him to school. So, of course he has no idea (or real damn concern) that there are plenty of us who can't afford to send our kids to school to have a doctor's education pasted onto them.
Ron Paul is a perfect example of one of these motherfuckers who was born on 3rd base and thinks he hit a triple.
Again, fuck him and his fans in the face. We do not need this world run by misanthropes and greed-heads.
Actually, Ron Paul had to work his way through college by delivering mail, doing laundry, working in a coffee shop, etc. His first year was paid for money he had saved by delivering newspapers, mowing lawns and running an honest to god lemonade stand as a kid. At one point he was offered a full athletic scholarship, but turned it down because he was still recovering from an injury and didn't think he would be competitive.
But hey, it's always just easier to to assume facts which happen to solidify your world view then do any research isn't it?
Well depending on how Amazon is using EC2, they could be doing the pre-caching in multiple zones so there may not be a single point of failure. But seriously, is this really a concern when:
1. The Kindle Fire screen, battery, PCB, etc are all a single point of failure 2. Your WiFi base station is probably a single point of failure 3. Your home cable/DSL modem is a single point of failure 4. The wires running between your home and the network POP is single point of failure 5. The DSLAM/whatever it's called in cable-speak is a single point of failure 6. etc etc etc
Yes, I know if you're using it at work you prolly have multiple WiFi access points and possibly redundant routers/connections to the internet, but why are you watching movies and playing angry birds at work?
Hell, the whole internet has gone down for large segments of the US due to construction workers/etc indiscriminately using backhoes to create huge fiber cuts, not to mention under sea cables being cut for various reasons.
I mean there's a lot of valid reasons why you may not want a Kindle Fire (I'm personally not interested in tablets at all), but I find this to be one of the weakest arguments out there.
While I have no doubt that proper chiropractic technique is safe and effective, there is always the possibility that the chiropractor didn't use proper technique or doesn't use the correct technique for the problem. That and I can say from personal experience that different chiropractors have different techniques and some are better then others. My last chiropractor was actually a husband/wife team and even though they tried to use the same technique, there was clear differences between the two of them. While they were OK (neither harmed me) I honestly have a hard time recommending them because I didn't get the same results as the guy I had used prior who unfortunately moved out of state.
My current chiropractor is much better and is far more open to listening to me and working with me and my life style to improve my health. Frankly he listens to me while my old one wanted to tell me how to live (specifically stop racing motorcycles).
Another reason I would give a negative review of my old chiropractor is that while he correctly had me get a MRI for my lower back, he then dismissed the analysis by the neurologist THAT HE RECOMMENDED and then made no changes in adjusting me. After I changed chiropractors, I had a new analysis done by a different neurologist (recommended by my current chiropractor) and the result is he changed how he adjusts me and the results have been fantastic.
Long story short, it's more then about someone causing your physical harm, but rather adjustment table side manner and technique which works for the patient.
Lastly, I'm really tired of the "us vs. them" mentality that chiropractors tend to have with the medical community. I'm not paying you so I can listen to how poorly you're treated by evil Big Pharma or people with Ph.D.'s. Bad mouthing others is a poor way of building a positive and long term relationship with a client.
1) All of California isn't silicon valley or even high tech. A lot of those lost jobs have been in housing and farming. 2) 1,200 of those jobs were financial sector. Sure some of those are IT, but clearly not all of them and it's unlikely they're a majority. 3) "trade, transportation, utilities" aren't areas where you see a lot of IT.
Frankly, this isn't nearly as bad as the dot com bust and there are good jobs to be had, but companies are watching head count and so people who don't interview well, only got into tech because of the $$$ not because they'd be any good at it, have little to no experience (You're just out of college? Great! What OSS project did you work on? == blank stare) or can't work well with others are going to find their options very limited.
My company has been hiring and I'm constantly amazed with the large quantity of crappy resumes and relatively few well written ones. And I'm not looking for people who double majored CS/EE at MIT, just people who are competent, bright and have a real desire to learn.
It's amazing how a little calm, forceful but clearly hostile response will cause them to remove you from their rolodex. This is a transcript of my latest victim:
So I've been doing this for about 5 years: - French press - Cheap blade grinder (yes it's hard to get a consistent grind, but with a french press you don't need it fine) - electric water pot for boiling fresh filtered water - Peets (www.peets.com) coffee shipped monthly directly to work (whole bean). 1lb lasts about a month, give or take a few days.
The keys to good coffee are: - Good, fresh beans, ground just before use - Fresh filtered water, boiled - Proper grind, which for the french press is coarser then espresso (super fine) or drip (medium-fine)
A french is probably the best economical means of extracting the flavor from the beans. Paper filters in drip makers absorb the oils which makes the coffee bitter and drip doesn't let the water have enough time to absorb the oils anyways.
I keep a coffee grinder and hot water boiler at my desk/break room. As I boil the water, I clean the pot from the previous day. After cleaning, I grind the beans, which is just about the time the water is boiling. Put beans in pot and pour water over them. Stir. Let steep 3 min. Push down the plunger, pour in cup, and drink right away. You may want to consider a vaccum thermos if you like drinking coffee all day, since coffee exposed to the open air will make it go bitter.
I do this every day, even though we have a high end italian espresso maker & burr grinder in the office since the beans they use in it are crappy (Starbucks french roast in 5lb bags).
This makes really really good coffee. You will notice that the coffee is better with a fresh bag. Honestly, the quality at the end of the bag is still way better then what I get out of the corporate drip machine (who knows how long that pot has been sitting there). If you're really that serious to care, you can either buy 1/2lb bags twice month or start roasting your own beans. Whatever you do though, use good quality fresh whole beans. I personally hate Starbucks, but I know some people have aquired a taste for burnt beans. But whatever you do, don't go to the supermarket and buy what they have on the shelf... could of been there for months.
Also, remember to not grind the hell out of the beans... a french press takes a corser grind then drip or espresso so that the filter mesh can do it's job. If you're drinking a lot of sluge, you're grinding them too much. If you're not getting enough flavor, you're either not letting it steep long enough, not stiring or not grinding enough.
After the initial startup costs (french press grinder and hot pot for boiling), it runs me just $20/mo including shipping for the Arabian Mocha Java. If you're willing to pick up the beans at the store yourself, you can probably shave off $4 or so. For what it's worth, I just store the beans in the bag they shipped in and keep them in my desk.
Seriously... if you love school and are interested in the classes, then go for it. Me, well I dropped out of college to work full time back in '99 and never looked back. Best thing I ever did. Obviously not everyone can be sucessful in technology w/o a college degree (I've done IT, software development and security) but it worked for me. FWIW, there are a number of other people at my current job (a small security startup) w/o college degrees too and they're just as good as the people with B.S.'s and M.S.'s.
If you want to move into upper management, then yeah, I can see how advanced degrees can really help you- especially in larger companies since they seem to care about things like that. But if you're not actually interested in upper management roles, then you're just wasting your time.
Uh, what part of "Strong network/systems troubleshooting skills." did you not understand?:) Simply put, if you don't know how a network works, you'll have a hard time troubleshooting problems. And while I have no doubt that you/anyone could memorize that TCP/UDP/ICMP is at layer 4 and IP is layer 3, actually being able to put that knowledge to use is quite different. Sorta like the difference between doing straight math problems and math word problems.
Or let me put it another way- if there is a network problem, the company couldn't wait a week while someone got up to speed with the fundementals so they could fix it.
As for how long I'll spend looking for the perfect hire... well as long as it damn well takes. I've been filling in for the IT person for a year now, another few more weeks won't kill me. And frankly, our company had very high standards for hiring and we are unwilling to lower our standards just because finding the right person is hard. If I'm not confident in the new IT person, I'm not going to be able to let go and concentrate on my real job.
Honestly, if this was a Jr. position and I had the time to mentor someone, then yeah, I'm more interested in how quickly you can learn and if the two of us get along. But this is a Sr. position and I don't have the time, so I expect them to know their shit.
The fact that you have to ask such a question tells me you're not qualified.:)
Seriously, if you want to run the network, servers, firewalls, etc for a small company and you can't explain the first 4 layers of the OSI stack then you're going to have a really hard time debugging network related problems. Sure, you can get away without knowing basic things like that, but troubleshooting issues becomes much much more difficult and time consuming if you don't have that background knowledge to provide a frame of reference.
Example: Try reading the output of tcpdump if you don't know the relationship of the ethernet, IP and tcp/udp/icmp headers.
It's simple: quality people can always find a job. Of course, you've gotta be honest with yourself. I've been interviewing IT candidates left and right for months now to take over IT responsibilities at the small startup I work for in the Bay Area. I've been horribly disappointed in what I've seen. People who have been doing IT for about 10 years and still don't know TCP runs over IP, how DHCP works or what an authoratitive DNS server is. People who claim to be experts in SQL and can't figure out how to write a query which joins two tables. One person thought it was perfectly OK to plug both ends of an ethernet cable into the same hub/switch. Of course, it's not enough to be technically competent. You have to be able to have a personality which doesn't make us think you're a stalker or that the only friends you have are on WoW. Being able to answer questions using complete sentances is a big plus.
But all of these candidates believed themselves to be worth hiring and competent enough to be the sole IT resource for the company. Maybe they're lying to me or themselves- dunno. But I hope all of them have plans for a 2nd career when the economy goes south.
We've also found 3 really good people whom we gave offer letters to. Two of them chose other companies for various reasons, and the other got a counter offer from his current employer and decided not to leave. Point is that good people get multiple offers and their current companies value them enough to make an effort to keep them. People who aren't that good, get passed up. If you tell your boss you're quitting and he/she doesn't try to keep you, that should be a warning sign that you are expendable and not valuable enough to keep should the need to reduce headcount arise.
Not everyone who likes technology is cut out to do IT. It requires the ability to learn both by reading and experiance, strong troubleshooting skills, an outgoing personality and a willingness to occasionally work strange hours and under emense stress. Very few people are talented enough to pull off the BOFH in todays competitive landscape. In my experiance, people who are in IT because they love it have a significantly higher success rate then people who are in it for the money. Unfortunately, just loving technology/IT isn't enough to be really good- just like my love for riding motorcycles doesn't make me good enough to race competitively.
If you've really got what it takes, then IT can be a really rewarding career. But if you don't, you'll find it very fustrating and in economic downturns very difficult to find a job should your current employer experiance financial difficulties or look to save money by outsourcing. Of course, if anyone reading this is interested and qualified to be the sole IT resource for a small security startup in Sunnyvale, CA, check out our website.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing how many anti-ad-blocking tools that websites use don't work and let you read the content unmolested if you disable JavaScript.
Maybe ASN.1 and SMI are so little known as a programming language because... they're not a programming language? Don't get me wrong, it's good to know if you're reading/writing RFC's or dealing with network protocols (especially in the telco space), but they're not programming languages.
Yeah, the number and variety of titles is lacking with Amazon KU. But this is typical Amazon (and business 101 actually). You start small and grow over time. Amazon negotiated the deals it could bring KU to market and no doubt plans to grow their titles/publishers over time. Remember when Amazon used to _only_ sell books? Or what about few titles were available Amazon Instant Video a year ago vs now? Sure, it won't happen over night (not so much Amazon's fault, they'd love to include more publishers/titles), but it will improve over time.
You want to destroy innovation in the tech sector? I guarantee you the fastest way to do that is unionize the tech field.
Love this ad by Dice/Red Hat in an attempt to attract talent. I mean, I sure hope it's an ad, because if it's a legit bit of "news" then slashdot's standards have really fallen.
I take it you've never heard of Libya or Syria? Not saying that in some situations a peaceful revolution can't be successful, but at the same time I don't believe it's the only means of doing so. American history shows that both ways can be successful, but it really depends on the leader.
Not to mention as we've seen in the Arab Spring uprising, it's one thing to use your military against a foreign nation, it's a totally different thing to use it against your own population. Soldiers generally don't like pointing their guns at their bothers, sisters, neighbors and friends.
Modern commercial aircraft are "reliable" because they get hundreds of hours of maintenance each year. Car engines are reliable, but require regular maintenance as well (oil changes, timing belt, etc). But generally it's all the electronics which start failing (electric door locks, powered windows, etc) for a wide range of reasons. My BMW for example has had various electronic problems including a recall on the spark plug coils (talk about an old technology and they still can't get it right!) and various other electronic gremlins (one of which killed my battery every 5 days if I didn't drive it because the A/C sucked 800ma/h even when off).
Frankly, I've been in tech now for nearly two decades and if it's taught me one thing it's this: very very few people/organizations know how to make reliable software & electronics. Those electronics which have to be reliable (or people die) are very very expensive vs. your normal commercial/consumer electronics (your iPod for example). Even systems designed with reliability in mind can fail (Amazon AWS outages for example).
Now start thinking about the conditions and elements a firearm is designed to go through with minimal maintenance: moisture, dirt, sand, salt, harsh cleaning chemicals, shock & vibration, etc which can cause corrosion and in general wreak havoc on electronics. Cars and plane electronics can have a lot of weather sealing (which adds bulk and weight) which is isn't so reasonable in a firearm you are supposed to carry and hold with one or two hands.
Simply put, added complexity reduces reliability and significantly increases costs.
That said, the best safety is training and being responsible (storing them in a safe, etc). Teaching people to respect (not fear) and how to properly handle firearms is the best safety. That's why I don't trust "safeties" on my firearms and I treat them as *always* loaded unless *I* personally have just verified it's state because a safety can fail for a variety of reasons (poor design, abuse, poor maintenance, etc). I won't even trust someone else verifying it for me- I have to visually check it myself.
That said, there are some really crappy guns being made which nobody should ever own/buy, but they're cheap. I do wish there were some appropriate safety/reliability testing standards that firearms had to pass and each one was given a rating (sorta like how safety ratings are done for cars). California does this which sorta gets it right, but causes problems for smaller manufacturers (like Les Baer, etc) which make very high quality firearms as well as other problems. A federal standard would help here, but frankly, I don't think I'd trust the Gov't to do it well and so a lot of gun owners like myself are hesitant to support such a measure and instead prefer to do our own research.
But you lost me the moment you mentioned ATA drives.
In my case, kicking and screaming. Our IT dept uses Oracle extensively for various things and for various reasons that basically forced my team to also use Oracle although we'd all prefer PG or yes even MySQL. Now that my team is moving to JRuby (which is awesome btw), Oracle driver suckage is less of a problem, but we all find Oracle a PITA to use query wise and it's not nearly as well supported in the OSS community for things like ActiveRecord (although recent versions of the oracle_enhanced-adapter seem to have solved many of our problems), etc.
That said, there have been some things that Oracle does really well and actually makes easy compared to PG/MySQL, but it's been a constant learning exercise for us. That said, little things like having to use WHERE ROWNUM = X, rather then LIMIT which basically always requires a subselect to get correct results is just annoying and makes our code less portable.
Not to say other RDBMS don't have their own set of problems, but at least we have a few decades worth of combined experience of PG/MySQL so we know how to avoid/work around them. But hey AC, thanks for the troll!
Might as well just ask: Which is better a BMW M3 or Ford F350 4x4 with 6.7 diesel?
Both are great, have their place and will get you from point A to B, but neither are a practical replacement for the other.
My current programming project is a mixture of Cassandra and Oracle (although, to be honest, I'd rather be using PostgreSQL or even MySQL).
At least here in California (your state may be different) the CTA (California Teachers Association which is the largest teachers union in California) is *very* powerful in state politics. Per wikipedia:
"The CTA is the most influential spender in California politics, spending more money on politicians and to influence California voters than Chevron, AT&T, Philip Morris and Western States Petroleum Association combined"
So yeah, if you don't think teacher unions don't influence politics here you're not paying attention.
Unfortunately, here in the Bay Area, diesel is often more expensive then premium and 30-40 cents more expensive then regular. Annoying since diesel is basically a by-product of refining gasoline, but the global market for diesel is exploding (the US is the worlds largest exporter of diesel) and the newer cleaner ultra-low sulfur formulations are sending the price skyhigh compared to what it used to be.
That's basically what happens today with most protocols like SSL/TLS. For each new connection, the client and server negotiate a new key via public key crypto like RSA. Actually, based on some comments in the article, like needing more "transactions" to help break the encryption, makes me believe the NSA is actually working to break RSA then AES.
I always make a point to include "books, magazines, websites, blogs, manuals, nutritional food labels, directions for building Ikea furniture, etc"
I've found it better then asking what their hobbies are and if they say they don't read anything then it's an immediate fail. Overall I've found it tends to allow people to open up a bit more about what floats their boat then trying to be all PC about things. Some people give really bland answers (especially if they don't read much), but I've found that the A players tend (but not always) to get really excited about this question and can talk about it at length. YMMV.
In the absence of a student loan program at the time, I can only imagine that his parents were actually wealthy enough to send him to school.
So, of course he has no idea (or real damn concern) that there are plenty of us who can't afford to send our kids to school to have a doctor's education pasted onto them.
Ron Paul is a perfect example of one of these motherfuckers who was born on 3rd base and thinks he hit a triple.
Again, fuck him and his fans in the face. We do not need this world run by misanthropes and greed-heads.
Actually, Ron Paul had to work his way through college by delivering mail, doing laundry, working in a coffee shop, etc. His first year was paid for money he had saved by delivering newspapers, mowing lawns and running an honest to god lemonade stand as a kid. At one point he was offered a full athletic scholarship, but turned it down because he was still recovering from an injury and didn't think he would be competitive.
But hey, it's always just easier to to assume facts which happen to solidify your world view then do any research isn't it?
Well depending on how Amazon is using EC2, they could be doing the pre-caching in multiple zones so there may not be a single point of failure. But seriously, is this really a concern when:
1. The Kindle Fire screen, battery, PCB, etc are all a single point of failure
2. Your WiFi base station is probably a single point of failure
3. Your home cable/DSL modem is a single point of failure
4. The wires running between your home and the network POP is single point of failure
5. The DSLAM/whatever it's called in cable-speak is a single point of failure
6. etc etc etc
Yes, I know if you're using it at work you prolly have multiple WiFi access points and possibly redundant routers/connections to the internet, but why are you watching movies and playing angry birds at work?
Hell, the whole internet has gone down for large segments of the US due to construction workers/etc indiscriminately using backhoes to create huge fiber cuts, not to mention under sea cables being cut for various reasons.
I mean there's a lot of valid reasons why you may not want a Kindle Fire (I'm personally not interested in tablets at all), but I find this to be one of the weakest arguments out there.
While I have no doubt that proper chiropractic technique is safe and effective, there is always the possibility that the chiropractor didn't use proper technique or doesn't use the correct technique for the problem. That and I can say from personal experience that different chiropractors have different techniques and some are better then others. My last chiropractor was actually a husband/wife team and even though they tried to use the same technique, there was clear differences between the two of them. While they were OK (neither harmed me) I honestly have a hard time recommending them because I didn't get the same results as the guy I had used prior who unfortunately moved out of state.
My current chiropractor is much better and is far more open to listening to me and working with me and my life style to improve my health. Frankly he listens to me while my old one wanted to tell me how to live (specifically stop racing motorcycles).
Another reason I would give a negative review of my old chiropractor is that while he correctly had me get a MRI for my lower back, he then dismissed the analysis by the neurologist THAT HE RECOMMENDED and then made no changes in adjusting me. After I changed chiropractors, I had a new analysis done by a different neurologist (recommended by my current chiropractor) and the result is he changed how he adjusts me and the results have been fantastic.
Long story short, it's more then about someone causing your physical harm, but rather adjustment table side manner and technique which works for the patient.
Lastly, I'm really tired of the "us vs. them" mentality that chiropractors tend to have with the medical community. I'm not paying you so I can listen to how poorly you're treated by evil Big Pharma or people with Ph.D.'s. Bad mouthing others is a poor way of building a positive and long term relationship with a client.
1) All of California isn't silicon valley or even high tech. A lot of those lost jobs have been in housing and farming.
2) 1,200 of those jobs were financial sector. Sure some of those are IT, but clearly not all of them and it's unlikely they're a majority.
3) "trade, transportation, utilities" aren't areas where you see a lot of IT.
Frankly, this isn't nearly as bad as the dot com bust and there are good jobs to be had, but companies are watching head count and so people who don't interview well, only got into tech because of the $$$ not because they'd be any good at it, have little to no experience (You're just out of college? Great! What OSS project did you work on? == blank stare) or can't work well with others are going to find their options very limited.
My company has been hiring and I'm constantly amazed with the large quantity of crappy resumes and relatively few well written ones. And I'm not looking for people who double majored CS/EE at MIT, just people who are competent, bright and have a real desire to learn.
It's amazing how a little calm, forceful but clearly hostile response will cause them to remove you from their rolodex. This is a transcript of my latest victim:
http://synfin.net/sock_stream/archives/65
So I've been doing this for about 5 years:
- French press
- Cheap blade grinder (yes it's hard to get a consistent grind, but with a french press you don't need it fine)
- electric water pot for boiling fresh filtered water
- Peets (www.peets.com) coffee shipped monthly directly to work (whole bean). 1lb lasts about a month, give or take a few days.
The keys to good coffee are:
- Good, fresh beans, ground just before use
- Fresh filtered water, boiled
- Proper grind, which for the french press is coarser then espresso (super fine) or drip (medium-fine)
A french is probably the best economical means of extracting the flavor from the beans. Paper filters in drip makers absorb the oils which makes the coffee bitter and drip doesn't let the water have enough time to absorb the oils anyways.
I keep a coffee grinder and hot water boiler at my desk/break room. As I boil the water, I clean the pot from the previous day. After cleaning, I grind the beans, which is just about the time the water is boiling. Put beans in pot and pour water over them. Stir. Let steep 3 min. Push down the plunger, pour in cup, and drink right away. You may want to consider a vaccum thermos if you like drinking coffee all day, since coffee exposed to the open air will make it go bitter.
I do this every day, even though we have a high end italian espresso maker & burr grinder in the office since the beans they use in it are crappy (Starbucks french roast in 5lb bags).
This makes really really good coffee. You will notice that the coffee is better with a fresh bag. Honestly, the quality at the end of the bag is still way better then what I get out of the corporate drip machine (who knows how long that pot has been sitting there). If you're really that serious to care, you can either buy 1/2lb bags twice month or start roasting your own beans. Whatever you do though, use good quality fresh whole beans. I personally hate Starbucks, but I know some people have aquired a taste for burnt beans. But whatever you do, don't go to the supermarket and buy what they have on the shelf... could of been there for months.
Also, remember to not grind the hell out of the beans... a french press takes a corser grind then drip or espresso so that the filter mesh can do it's job. If you're drinking a lot of sluge, you're grinding them too much. If you're not getting enough flavor, you're either not letting it steep long enough, not stiring or not grinding enough.
After the initial startup costs (french press grinder and hot pot for boiling), it runs me just $20/mo including shipping for the Arabian Mocha Java. If you're willing to pick up the beans at the store yourself, you can probably shave off $4 or so. For what it's worth, I just store the beans in the bag they shipped in and keep them in my desk.
Seriously... if you love school and are interested in the classes, then go for it. Me, well I dropped out of college to work full time back in '99 and never looked back. Best thing I ever did. Obviously not everyone can be sucessful in technology w/o a college degree (I've done IT, software development and security) but it worked for me. FWIW, there are a number of other people at my current job (a small security startup) w/o college degrees too and they're just as good as the people with B.S.'s and M.S.'s.
If you want to move into upper management, then yeah, I can see how advanced degrees can really help you- especially in larger companies since they seem to care about things like that. But if you're not actually interested in upper management roles, then you're just wasting your time.
Uh, what part of "Strong network/systems troubleshooting skills." did you not understand? :) Simply put, if you don't know how a network works, you'll have a hard time troubleshooting problems. And while I have no doubt that you/anyone could memorize that TCP/UDP/ICMP is at layer 4 and IP is layer 3, actually being able to put that knowledge to use is quite different. Sorta like the difference between doing straight math problems and math word problems.
Or let me put it another way- if there is a network problem, the company couldn't wait a week while someone got up to speed with the fundementals so they could fix it.
As for how long I'll spend looking for the perfect hire... well as long as it damn well takes. I've been filling in for the IT person for a year now, another few more weeks won't kill me. And frankly, our company had very high standards for hiring and we are unwilling to lower our standards just because finding the right person is hard. If I'm not confident in the new IT person, I'm not going to be able to let go and concentrate on my real job.
Honestly, if this was a Jr. position and I had the time to mentor someone, then yeah, I'm more interested in how quickly you can learn and if the two of us get along. But this is a Sr. position and I don't have the time, so I expect them to know their shit.
The fact that you have to ask such a question tells me you're not qualified. :)
Seriously, if you want to run the network, servers, firewalls, etc for a small company and you can't explain the first 4 layers of the OSI stack then you're going to have a really hard time debugging network related problems. Sure, you can get away without knowing basic things like that, but troubleshooting issues becomes much much more difficult and time consuming if you don't have that background knowledge to provide a frame of reference.
Example: Try reading the output of tcpdump if you don't know the relationship of the ethernet, IP and tcp/udp/icmp headers.
But all of these candidates believed themselves to be worth hiring and competent enough to be the sole IT resource for the company. Maybe they're lying to me or themselves- dunno. But I hope all of them have plans for a 2nd career when the economy goes south.
We've also found 3 really good people whom we gave offer letters to. Two of them chose other companies for various reasons, and the other got a counter offer from his current employer and decided not to leave. Point is that good people get multiple offers and their current companies value them enough to make an effort to keep them. People who aren't that good, get passed up. If you tell your boss you're quitting and he/she doesn't try to keep you, that should be a warning sign that you are expendable and not valuable enough to keep should the need to reduce headcount arise.
Not everyone who likes technology is cut out to do IT. It requires the ability to learn both by reading and experiance, strong troubleshooting skills, an outgoing personality and a willingness to occasionally work strange hours and under emense stress. Very few people are talented enough to pull off the BOFH in todays competitive landscape. In my experiance, people who are in IT because they love it have a significantly higher success rate then people who are in it for the money. Unfortunately, just loving technology/IT isn't enough to be really good- just like my love for riding motorcycles doesn't make me good enough to race competitively.
If you've really got what it takes, then IT can be a really rewarding career. But if you don't, you'll find it very fustrating and in economic downturns very difficult to find a job should your current employer experiance financial difficulties or look to save money by outsourcing. Of course, if anyone reading this is interested and qualified to be the sole IT resource for a small security startup in Sunnyvale, CA, check out our website.
Good luck.